English 101 Reflection

Coming to the University of Alabama, I knew that I had to take English 101, English Composition and I dreaded it since I have always been a poor writer. Throughout my entire career as a student, I always worried about upcoming writing assignments. Stressing about such assignments would delay my motivational drive to write and led to procrastination and poor performance on assignments due to writing under a time crunch. Instead of dread, taking English 101 turned out to be a great benefit since now writing is no longer the all-encompassing black hole of fear that it once was. Looking back, I notice how much I have changed in terms of my fear and anxiety of writing. At the beginning of the fall semester, I was very anxious about the anticipated
The major problem areas that still need more improvement are grammar, word choice, spelling and transitions/connections to sustain focus in my writing. In nearly all of my essays, I had grammatical errors, awkward word choice, and punctuation errors but these errors showed most clearly in my Argumentative Synthesis essay. The essay required us to analyze four texts on the same topic and then build our own argument based on that topic. I did poorly on this paper because the majority of errors on my papers were the results of poor grammar and misspelling. For example, I spelled the character’s name wrong from the movie Brave. I spelled it “Merrida” when it’s supposed to be spelled Merida. I can improve on spelling errors by paying more attention when reviewing my paper, going to the writing center, or get someone else to help me edit it so I will have a second pair of eyes to catch errors. This was also a factor of rushing through the assignment and not dedicating enough time to the assignment for review and revision. Another major area that I need to work on is to write transition sentences and connection sentences to better link my main points and keep focused on my thesis. I often fail to follow my thesis development and provide specific examples followed by analysis to support my claim. This is a key issue in my writing as I tend to lose focus and I do not follow up on my quotes with analysis to provide evidence to my readers. This featured greatly in my argumentative synthesis essay. For example I used “Most girls wouldn’t want to buy a tom boy looking doll with a bow and arrow.” In this paper, I didn’t back up this claim and I didn’t provide the reader with specific